Tomatoes syrup

I know it may shock you, but yes, you read well: tomatoes syrup!

Why not? The tomato is a fruit after all; it’s got a lot of water and enough acidity so that we can make syrup worthy of a sophisticated larder. If you’ve got bio tomatoes you must try making it, since you can do both tomato sauce and syrup from the same quantity of tomatoes. I have chosen this way of preserving tomatoes as well because lycopene is the antioxidant that becomes more active in boiled products. If I hadn’t removed the excess juice, I would have had to boil de tomato sauce for a lot longer and that wouldn’t have been quite the most pleasant thing in that end summer heat. I haven’t yet written about inverting sugar, but I have thought out its logic (I am still not completely sure about it) and I decided that to do it you need acidified water and sugar. Tomatoes are 94% water and tomato juice has a pH of 4, so you could say I am doing both syrup and inverting sugar at the same time.

Tomato Syrup – Ingredients and method of preparation

1. Tomatoes

2. Sugar

As I said, we can make the syrup together with the sauce.

Put the sliced tomatoes in a big pot.

Place them over small fire and, with a wooden spoon, we stir very often, at least until they leave their juice.

Careful! Do not forget the pot; the tomatoes stick to the bottom of the pan very quickly!

The moment it starts boiling and leaves abundant juice, start removing the juice and filtering it into another pan.

This juice will become syrup. If you don’t have the time to do both simultaneously, remove the tomato pan off fire and finish the syrup first.

Measure the quantity of juice and, for each liter of juice, add 1KG of sugar. The juice has got an acidic pH of around 4, perfect for inverting sugar.

Therefore, place the pan with the juice and sugar mix over fire and leave it to boil for about 10 minutes.

Remove all of the foam that will form on the surface of the liquid. This foam contains all of the toxins inside the juice.

In the moment when the syrup is pure, you can pour it hot inside bottles that have been sterilized inside the oven for 30 minutes at small fire.

Boil the lids, so they don’t get burned inside the over. After closing the lids, place the bottles bottoms up, under a thick cloth, until the next day.